MEG 2: THE TRENCH is a wildly uneven effort, spending as it does most of its time as dud of an action drama and the rest as a rapturously unhinged action comedy. It is far more successful at the latter. Fortunately, star Jason Statham doesn’t let a creaky script (and that’s what we have here) get the better of him. As I’ve oft-times mentioned, and fully endorse, Patton Oswalt in an interview with me once opined that Jason Statham makes any movie better, and Statham’s gift for that is nowhere better on display than here.
We begin not with Jonas Taylor (Statham) and friends where we left them at the end of THE MEG, instead we are reminded of why the megalodon, that prehistoric shark of school-bus proportions, was the apex predator. In a swift précis on the food chain during the Cretaceous Period, we see it take out a T. Rex with little fuss and less bother. Returning to the present, we see Jonas do the same with some bad guys dumping radioactive waste into the ocean. How better to show off Statham’s mastery of improvised parkour and ability to do the impossible without breaking a sweat as the Green James Bond?
The plot involves what happens when Jonas and a crew from the Hainan China Oceanographic Institute continue mapping the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on earth at 25,000 feet. Nefarious doings are afoot that will land the crews of two Institute submarines in trouble, and afford the filmmakers the opportunity to show off some nifty special effects, from bioluminescent anemones to a group of usually solitary Megs schooling up for what might be a little meg nooky. At least that that’s the opinion of Dr. Jiuming Zhang (Jing Wu). Plus, he recognizes one of those schooling pups as Haiqi, a meg he’s convinced that he’s tamed after raising her up from an injured pup, but has broken out of the institute’s supposedly meg-proof tank to answer nature’s primal call.
There’s also an evil scheme to mess up the ocean’s ecosystem (even more than it is) by the typical bunch of greedy, short-sighted industrialists, and the doughty 14-year-old girl (Shuya Sophia Cai), orphaned in the last film, who keeps getting herself into the kind of trouble from which only Jonas can save her. It gets old very quickly, though one can’t help but admire the way her cute hairdo manages to stay in place in any and all sorts of dire emergencies, both on land and under the sea, sometimes IN the sea.
But I digress.
Savvy fans of shark films will note with interest the similarities to DEEP BLUE SEA and, of course, JAWS, to name but two. It works so much better when the action has turned farcical as the plot rises to the surface and invades an island resort full of pampered tourists. In fact, if the filmmakers had decided to go full Sharknado like this from the start, this would have been a thoroughly entertaining flick that invited us to laugh along with the absurdity. As it stands, we get only part of that flick, and doing his damndest to make it all somehow work, albeit to varying degrees, is Statham, doing the impossible with a cool reserve and bracing focus. Even when he’s out there alone on a jet ski, outflanking and outsmarting three megs, even when you know it’s beyond silly, you go along with it because he looks so good doing it.
For the rest, it’s selective aggression on the part of the creatures from the trench, including some petulant prehistoric marine iguanas, and the usual rounds of bad guys who can’t shoot an easy target and make poor decisions, both offensive and defensive. The latter allows the bumblers of the piece, Mac and DJ (Cliff Curtis and Page Kennedy) have their own moments in the sun. Kennedy, in particular, returns in the sequel fully trained in martial arts, fully prepared with a designer backpack, and fully hilarious as he puts his new skills to use to his absolute astonishment. Wu smiles well and is so buoyantly cheerful that his repeated escapes from certain death are less irking than could have been even though they fail to make a proper running joke of themselves.
MEG 2: THE TRENCH as a tense action movie is perfectly unremarkable, but that last part almost makes up for it, thanks to a delightful view of those ci–mentioned pampered tourists about to meet their doom from inside the meg’s tooth-encrusted mouth, a boundless refusal to take itself seriously, and Jason Statham once again proving that he makes everything better.
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